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Lessons of Sandy: How to keep your phone juiced longer

Question: How can I keep my phone running as long as possible during a natural disaster like Sandy? Answer: For all the grief that the wireless carriers get for dropping calls in ordinary circumstances,

Question: How can I keep my phone running as long as possible during a natural disaster like Sandy?

Answer: For all the grief that the wireless carriers get for dropping calls in ordinary circumstances, they've earned a lot of credit this week for keeping some service intact even as Hurricane Sandy punched the lights out up and down the Northeast Corridor.

The most important one among them is having an external charger that can replenish a phone's battery multiple times, yet is light enough to carry to the nearest working outlet. Most of you already own one: a laptop computer.

Keep a laptop plugged in when idle at home — or at least do that once the weather forecasts turn foreboding — and you can recharge your phone by plugging it into one of its USB ports. On some models, you may need to wake the laptop to get power flowing to the phone, but you should then be able to close the computer's screen as the mobile device continues to recharge.

People hug as they wait to have their phones and laptops charged at a portable generator set up on Nov. 1 in the West Village in New York City. Hurricane Sandy left parts of the state and the surrounding area flooded and without power. Timothy A. Clary, AFP/Getty Images

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Next, remember how to set your phone to sip power. The simplest way to do this is to disable as many of its built-in transmitters as possible: GPS, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth are all expendable when you only need mobile broadband service.

In Android, you can often shut off all three with a power-control widget available by swiping down from the top of the screen; if not, open the Settings app and look under its wireless and location headings. In iOS, you can disable Wi-Fi and Bluetooth from the Settings app's main menu; in iOS 5, you can also kill GPS under the Location Services heading, but in iOS 6 you need to select the Privacy category to see that option.

Then crank your phone's screen all the way down by disabling its auto-brightness option and dimming its backlight as low as possible: hit the Display category in Android's Settings app or the Brightness or Brightness & Wallpaper heading in iOS, depending on your version. The screen will be hard to read in daylight, but who cares when the lights are out at home?

(In a weird way, my experience nursing smartphones along at crowded, battery-killing tech events like CES turned out to be good training for the 40 hours my family and I spent without power, which is nothing compared to what friends in New York and New Jersey are still going through).

Tip: Your phone may also be an FM radio

What if you have no Internet access at all? If you own an Android phone, it may include an FM radio tuner that you can use to receive updates during an emergency. Several Motorola and Samsung models, among others, ship with this feature; to tune in, plug in a headphone cable (which doubles as an antenna) and scan around in that app until you find a news station.